Teradata IntelliCloud Now Available on Microsoft Azure

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We are pleased to announce General Availability (GA) of Teradata IntelliCloud on Microsoft Azure.

IntelliCloud on Azure is now available in all commercial Azure regions in the United States. This includes:

CENTRAL US

EAST US

EAST US 2

NORTH CENTRAL US

SOUTH CENTRAL US

WEST CENTRAL US

WEST US

WEST US 2

So, why is this GA announcement such a big deal? Lets explore.

Business Benefits

If you recall, Teradata IntelliCloud is our fully-managed “as-a-service” offering consisting of software, services, infrastructure, and support. Teradata cloud experts set up and manage the software and infrastructure so that you can focus on business outcomes.

There are four key areas managed by the IntelliCloud service: Performance, Security, Availability, and Operations. The business benefits of having each of these four areas included in the IntelliCloud subscription are:

Getting the most value from your investment

Having peace of mind about security

Enjoying higher uptime and greater business continuity

Focusing on business outcomes rather than infrastructure management

Five key elements of competitive differentiation for Teradata in the cloud

Use Cases

Teradata customers like you are doing all the same use cases in the cloud as they are with their on-premises systems. This includes production analytics, development and test, proofs of concept, and disaster recovery.

That’s one of the great things about Teradata in the cloud: there is no inherent limitation to the types of workloads that can be supported because it’s the same Teradata software across all deployment options.

We sometimes refer to this as “Teradata is Teradata” – because it’s the same software everywhere.

Security

Teradata recognizes that security is often the number one concern when organizations like yours evaluate a cloud offering, which is why we’ve designed Teradata IntelliCloud with security as the primary consideration.

Service Features

IntelliCloud service features are comprehensive across each of the four attributes:

Performance is enabled by multiple instance types and multiple regions for low-latency access

Security is provided via 24x7 monitoring, encryption of data in motion and at rest, and audited compliance for ISO 27001, SOC 1 and 2, PCI, and HIPAA standards

Availability is guaranteed with a Service Level Agreement for up to 99% uptime in Azure as well as daily backups for rollback and business continuity

Environmental Operations are taken care of including software patches, version upgrades, and a self-service web-based management console for easy account administration

Time Savings

When considering the value of all the services provided with IntelliCloud, it’s useful to think how much time would be required if your own employees had to do everything themselves.

Your time estimates may vary for each of the components of IntelliCloud service (Performance, Security, Availability, and Operations), but depending on the complexity of the environment, we estimate between one and three Full Time Equivalent resources would be required to do everything that comes with IntelliCloud.

Considering a budgetary cost of $150,000 for a fully-loaded FTE, that’s solid value.

IntelliCloud Management Console

One of the great things about IntelliCloud is that, while it is indeed a fully-managed environment, you still have self-service visibility and control over many service parameters.

The IntelliCloud Management Console is an easy-to-use web-based portal in which you can monitor and manage key aspects of your IntelliCloud accounts.

For example, you can view site details such as node type, quantity, and storage; IP addresses; usage metrics for memory and disk utilization trends over a day, a week, or a month; and with IntelliCloud on AWS and Azure you can also add inbound and outbound firewall rules to allow only approved IP addresses, ports, and/or protocols.

Competitive Differentiation

There are five key elements of competitive differentiation for Teradata in the cloud – our advantages when compared to market alternatives.

Hybrid Cloud

The first key advantage and differentiator for Teradata is Hybrid Cloud capability – the fact that we offer the same software across the broadest range of deployment choice.

In fact, having hybrid capability is so important that Forrester says that companies should insist on it, and Gartner says that “The majority of enterprises leveraging cloud will be living in a hybrid world for the foreseeable future.”

As such, having Teradata software consistency and license portability across all deployment types allows you to move workloads as your needs change, which is important because it de-risks your decisions.

Market Leadership

Our next advantage and differentiator is our market leadership position as evidenced by six different analyst evaluations.

Whether it is the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Forrester Waves, or Information Difference Landscapes, we are consistently ranked as a leader for vision, ability to execute, and customer loyalty.

So, because you get the same Teradata software in the cloud as you get in our on-premises systems, you can take comfort in knowing that all same award-winning software attributes also carry over to the cloud.

Market Focus

Teradata has been, and remains, fully committed to the most demanding analytic requirements on the planet – and the companies who aspire to be truly data-driven.

If you just want to do reporting and understand “what happened” with some basic ad hoc reports, then there are a variety of market alternatives available for that.

But if you really want to move up into understanding “why did something happen”, and know “what is happening right now”, and predict “what will happen next”, then an offering geared for reporting won’t be sufficient.

Teradata shines in these higher stages of advanced analytics where query complexity and mixed workloads and high concurrency really matter and are mission-critical. No alternative comes close.

Services

The fourth area of advantage and differentiation for Teradata is our services – our unique capabilities to help you Architect, Implement, and Manage your environments.

Over half of Teradata’s revenue is from services, and over 5,000 Teradata professionals worldwide do nothing but specialize in helping companies get the most value from their data.

We have a dozen service packages that are tailored to Cloud deployment AND we have a great set of systems integrator partners for those companies already aligned with a services provider.

The bottom line is that we have unique capabilities and a depth of experience and a set of alliance partners that are unmatched by any other company.

Performance

Our fifth area of advantage and differentiation is performance, which is what Teradata has always been known for.

We recently ran a live benchmark test comparing five systems running medium concurrency mixed workloads. Three of the systems were Teradata software running on different types of infrastructure, and the other two systems were Hadoop and the leading cloud database.

I'll highlight two of the key takeaways:

Teradata outperforms the leading cloud database by over 17,000times in terms of both total queries and queries per hour when using the same public cloud infrastructure. This is huge and illustrates that, regardless of the environment, Teradata is the most performant analytic engine at scale, period.

The leading cloud database is over 11,000 times more expensive per query than Teradata running on the same public cloud infrastructure. Again, this is massive and illustrates that for enterprises running mixed workload analytics at scale, there is simply no comparison to the value provided by Teradata.

There are many more results that can be gleaned from the benchmark – and we can provide a separate deck that goes into the details – but suffice it to say that Teradata is the most performant analytics platform, bar none.

Getting Started

How can you get started with Teradata in the cloud?

We always recommend starting first with a Cloud Workshop to help your team get their arms around objectives, priorities, data sources, ecosystem software, and workload-specific variables.

A Cloud Workshop is a short engagement that walks you through everything needed to match your business goals with the expected benefits and deployment options.

Regardless of experience in using the cloud for other types of business applications, most customers are surprised to learn about the gaps and false assumptions in their understanding about what is and is not feasible with Teradata in the cloud.

As such, a Cloud Workshop will help your team gain the most benefit when it comes to determining the best fit for your organization for Teradata analytics in the cloud.

Brian Wood is director of cloud marketing at Teradata. He has over 15 years' experience leading all areas of technology marketing in cloud, wireless, IT, software, and data analytics. He earned an MS in Engineering Management from Stanford, a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell, and served as an F-14 Radar Intercept Officer in the US Navy.